Category Archives: Featured Research

1) New and prospective PhD students will want to know: what brought you to your research subject? In other words, how did you come to discover the topic and determine how you would engage with it?

The gist of my research is about understanding the social and political dynamics of community-based research, and how knowledge that stems from those efforts can empower people to influence environmental decision-making. For instance, in my dissertation I investigated the emergence of citizen science groups across the Marcellus Shale that had mobilized to assess gas extraction’s risks to watersheds. As I suspect is the case with many PhD students, these topics were nowhere on my mental map when I entered my doctoral program. In fact, I knew very little about the energy industry. I grew up in Eastern Massachusetts. Most people there turn on the stove, gas comes out of the pilot, and you don’t know much about where it comes from. I was a caretaker for an Audubon nature sanctuary for a number of years, but had never worked on watershed issues.

MRD: Your site – Mexico’s National Institute for Respiratory Disease or INER – and your topic – the role that concepts of air pollution and disease play in making the Mexican nation – are, to say the least, quite unique. How did you come to be there in the first place and studying these topics? What was the first ‘aha’ moment that led you to think of this as your dissertation topic?

Emily: I found my way to my dissertation topic through a combination of strategy and serendipity (as I imagine many people do). I have long been interested in the development of biosecurity practices and the intersection of science and politics. Early on I had done ethnographic research in a biodefense and infectious disease research lab in Chicago, and I wanted to build on that experience for my dissertation. The outbreak of H1N1, or swine flu, that started in Mexico, drew my attention. The outbreak was a surprise to public health experts, who had anticipated that the next influenza pandemic would be one of bird flu from Southeast Asia. The outbreak generated debates in Mexico, as people argued about why it happened and what should be done about it. Different people blamed the outbreak on the industrialization of Mexican agriculture, the lack of funding for public health, the absence of regulations, neoliberalism, and even human genetics.

Intrigued by these debates, I went to Mexico to study the development of biosecurity. I wanted to know how scientists produced knowledge about Mexican biology, and how this knowledge informed political projects to protect health. In short, I was interested in how science and the nation are co-constituted through biosecurity projects. I thought Mexico would be a provocative site to study these issues because while it’s deeply implicated in western projects and foundationally conditioned by European expansion, indigenous worlds are also essential to understanding Mexico. This combination of European and indigenous worlds continues to be an important element of the collective imagination of the nation and political ideology, informing the ways people think about the population and serving as the basis for arguments that Mexican populations are different. Further, looking at scientific and health research on the periphery helps demonstrate how contingent and local relations shapes discourse and scientific research about biological organisms. This is especially relevant in an age of global health and conservation regulations. Work in Mexico helps critique or complicate the idea of the universality of biology (both as discipline and life forms).

Initially, I planned to look at biosecurity in relation to infectious disease. However, what I found was that while in the U.S. biosecurity tends to be defined as protecting the population from intentionally introduced disease, in Mexico, when people talk about biosecurity they talk about health and the environment much more broadly – not just human health, but also ecological health, invasive species, biotechnology, and genetically modified organisms. My dissertation ended up being a multi-sited project, and the paper that I presented for the Rappaport prize addressed just one of those sites. In addition to working at Mexico’s National Institute for Respiratory Disease, I did fieldwork with conservationists eradicating invasive species on Mexico’s islands, and with ecologists at the National Institute of Ecology who were involved in regulating the use of genetically modified organisms.

MRD: One of your most interesting findings is that the history of HIV/AIDS in Mexico, by comparison with the U.S., is seen by Mexican and U.S. scientists alike as an ‘asset’. Crucial differences – Mexican doctors tends to not see HIV/AIDS patients until much later in the progression of the disease; on the other hand Mexico’s relatively late arrival to establishing a national HIV/AIDS treatment program means that it did not repeat the U.S. history of treating patients with suboptimal anti-retroviral therapies – means that Mexico has many patients with personal illness histories that are rare in the U.S. As one American doctor visiting the INER said, “It’s a fantastic opportunity”, for research. Can you say more about the significance of this perceived time-lag in disease treatment between developed and late-developing countries, which in a way is reminiscent of another purported time-lag currently in the news, namely that between early industrializing countries that are now curbing their carbon emissions and late-industrializing countries that are loathe to do so?

Emily: This question gets at something that was difficult for me to grapple with, which was how to think through my interlocutors’ tendency to articulate difference in terms of temporality or a time-lag. As Johannes Fabian writes, ethnographic narratives have often placed their subjects outside of the time of the anthropologist writing them. I didn’t want to replicate that kind of temporal relationship, but I was quite interested in the ways that the physicians and other scientists I talked with proposed various gaps in times between different places, and in thinking through how people in other disciplines view time, and see various people or places as located in different times, or make reference to different historical periods to ground their work.

For example, determining whether a species is native or invasive often entails choosing a particular temporal reference point for an ecosystem. The Mexican National Strategy for Invasive Species, an important planning document developed by the federal government’s National Commission for the Study and Use of Biodiversity gives definitions of key terms. The strategy defines native species as “those naturally found in a region as a result of a long process of adaptation to the existing environmental conditions,” while alien species, on the other hand, are species occurring outside of their past or present natural range. So, whether a species is native or alien is in some ways a question of the duration of their presence in a place.

I did fieldwork with conservationists from the Grupo de Ecología y Conservacíon de Islas, an NGO that works on islands in Mexico, eradicating invasive species in an effort to restore a past natural order. Islands have long been imagined as utopian spaces where the social and natural order can be rethought, and where the past has been preserved. Following the work of GECI scientists, I found that while they did not see islands as places out of time or where the past had been precisely preserved, they did represent a more recoverable past than the mainland, and places where it would be possible to undo some of the homogenization of the environment brought about by processes of globalization and capitalism.

I’m hesitant to frame the question of carbon emissions and industrializing in terms of a time-lag, which to me implies that industrialization in all countries should follow the same path and that some countries are merely further behind on this path. I suppose I’m an optimist, in that I hope that late-industrializing countries might be places in which a better path can be found. Further, I believe that ultimately it is the responsibility of early-industrializing countries like the U.S. to radically curb their carbon emissions, regardless of the activities of other countries.

MRD: Another major finding of your’s concerns the link between disease and national identity and boundaries. You demonstrate that the Mexican medical establishment believes in a uniquely Mexican biology and so, contra the prevalent idea that “disease knows no boundaries”, they see the particular manifestation of HIV/AIDS there as a specifically Mexican problem, one moreover that unites the populace in facing a shared national risk. This contrasts starkly with the recent U.S. stance toward the Ebola outbreak in Africa, which was seen – albeit with some exceptions within the U.S. political establishment – as a shared global risk. Your case seems to be another example of how the processes of globalization that were until fairly recently seen as rolling uniformly over the globe, can encounter locally opposing tendencies, in the most unexpected places and topics – as Mexican HIV/AIDS surely is, yes?

Emily: Yes, definitely. The rhetoric of disease knowing no borders has been very powerful in public health, and there’s been a push to move beyond state-centric or nation-based health projects towards treating health and biology as a global system. Part of the argument for this change is that globalization has transformed the nature of health risks and essentially dissolved the borders between nations, at least in terms of disease.

This move, however, has generated tension in Mexico between international goals and expectations and local needs. For example, in the case of HIV/AIDS, the scientists I worked with argued that it was essential to understand the epidemiology and viral diversity of HIV in Mexico. The argued that HIV was different from other places as a result of the genomic characteristics and immune responses of the human population of Mexico, as well as the political, social, and economic history that shaped trajectories of access to antiretroviral therapy in different countries. Standard reference strains used in HIV research that come primarily from U.S. patients may miss important aspects of viral life in Mexico. Conducting research similarly requires scientists to analyze and reckon with the way local biology is different – how the microbial and viral ecology around the lab and the state of the immune systems of lab workers are not the same globally and must be accounted for in analyzing the risk of various lab procedures. So, while organizations like the WHO seek to implement global health systems and regulations, scientists in Mexico are dealing with biology that refuses to be global, and instead remains idiosyncratically local.

MRD: Your research clearly also contributes to ongoing discussions within anthropology about the sense of place. As you point out, attitudes toward air within the Mexican medical establishment complicate ideas of place – by expanding boundaries (of those affected by pollution and disease) outwards; at the same time as the aforementioned notion of a uniquely local, Mexican biology contracts boundaries (viz., of a unique HIV/AIDS threat) inwards. Can you expand on these divergent tendencies and on what you think you can contribute to current theorizing regarding place in anthropology?

Emily: My sense of one way that these divergent tendencies are linked is that they both tell us something about the politics of scale. Both air and HIV are in this case abstractions or incorporeal elements that people are using to understand their connection to one another. The borders around air or biology could be drawn in myriad ways. I’m interested in the particular connections that people see in the movement of air or patterns of viral infection. The scale at which the boundaries of care or concern could be drawn is flexible, and in this case it tended to be drawn at a national level, encompassing the entire population. In this way I see echoes in current scientific practice of historical political and social projects to unite the entire nation through the process of mestizaje, or the mixture of indigenous and European populations to produce a homogenized national body.

Regarding place in other sense, I’m also interested in places of science, particularly the lab and field. Historian of science Robert Kohler outlined the divide between lab and field, identifying them as two distinct cultural domains with different languages, customs, material, and moral economies. I suggest, however, that this dichotomy did not hold for the scientific practices I observed. Neither the lab nor the field in Mexico were purely lab or purely field. Instead, both represented hybrids. Laboratories, even those that specialize in containment, were not separated from the city in which they were located, and the scientists I studied did not think of the lab as placeless. Similarly, field sites were transformed into laboratories in which large-scale scientific experiments were conducted. The work of ecologists was not simply to characterize natural places but also to intervene in them. I also argue for the importance of a third scientific space, the office. The office was distinct from but also entangled with the lab and the field, and was where scientists engaged with bureaucratic processes and paperwork and shaped the administration of Mexican ecosystems and agriculture.

MRD: You speak of your research, in part, as a study of the way that “biosecurity projects” contribute to the production of Mexican science and nation. For a decade and more, many anthropologists have drawn on Foucault’s concept of ‘biopolitics’ to analyze similar sorts of issues. How does your research contribute to – or move beyond – this literature on biopolitics?

Emily: One thing that I hope to contribute to the extensive literature on science, nation, and biopolitics is an understanding of how biopolitics and biosecurity have been extended beyond the reglation of human life to encompass animal, plant, and microbial worlds. In my dissertation I bring together accounts of scientists working on lab safety, urban air quality, viral ecologies, biotechnology and bureaucracy, and island laboratories in order to analyze what happens when biology becomes the subject of security practices.

By analyzing these wide-ranging security practices, I can show how the nation is being defined in scientific work, as people establish who or what is within a group and who is excluded from group membership. In these practices, scientists make claims about how biology has been shaped by history, culture, and environment. They define which life forms are to be protected, which constitute a threat or danger, and they make arguments for how to adjust human behavior to improve the health of people and the environment more generally. I argue that Mexican biopolitics have become multispecies projects, and as a result, disciplining and regulating the health of the nation entails thinking about many kinds of life forms and their interactions.

Shafqat: Please tell us something about yourself and why you chose environmental anthropology (political ecology) as a subject for your PhD?

Jerry: I grew up in California, did my bachelor’s in linguistics and a master’s in anthropology, and I’m currently finishing my PhD in anthropology at UC Berkeley. After graduating college, on something of a whim, I moved to China to work as a program manager at an environmental non-profit in Shanghai, which was my first real education into environmental politics as well as my first education on China. Both were disorienting to me, in the most exciting way. And what was clear and fascinating to me was that both thinking with Chinese politics and thinking with environmental problems would demand the assembling of a critical and political vocabulary that could be glimpsed in things I’d learned as an undergraduate and yet was still yet to come. Because of my job at the time, I was confronted with the feeling that thinking with environments would open something about politics and life in China that couldn’t be pinpointed in any other way, which is what brought me to political ecology, which was an opening into a lot of the other things that populate the analytic and ethnographic landscape of my dissertation. The work has emerged in conversation and encounter across many ways of knowing and acting with environments; my committee is half anthropologists and half geographers, my fieldwork brought me in contact with forestry administrators, ecologists, and Aeolian physicists, all of which have left a stamp on my thinking.

Shafqat: What is your dissertation about and what interests you in this particular issue?

Jerry: My dissertation is titled “States of the Wind: Dust Storms and a Political Meteorology of Contemporary China.” Broadly, my dissertation is about dust storms and politics in northern China. Since the early 2000s, the Chinese state has redoubled its programs for combating dust storms which, on the wind, connect desertification and exposed sand in inland, upwind places, with many places downwind along the wind’s path. These include Beijing, but also, over days, Seoul, Japan, and even the US. These programs of ecological construction against the movements of sand on wind have aimed essentially to transform the social and physical topographies of upwind China through environmental engineering, forestry, and new forms of social management oriented toward something called ‘environment.’ I became interested first in how the trajectories of dust storms also suddenly became the template of a political zone for intervening in strange weather, and then, in how the demand to control dust storms worked especially at controlling the relationship between the earth and the wind. My fieldwork tried to replicate this movement, and different fieldsites are arranged as moments in the airstream of a possible dust storm. Dust storms are fascinating as an environmental problem because demanded an attunement to the capacities of sandy earth to become roving atmospheres. So in each chapter I tried to think with sand, wind, and environments as elements in configuring particular political experiments, and then asked how the governing of human life – politics – is given when the focus is not ‘society’ per se, but the ways in which human, botanical, geological, and Aeolian things configure an ‘environment’ which in some way demands a rethinking of some political formation, either at the level of those governing, or for the anthropologist trying to make sense of a politics attuned to entanglements of environmental things.

In the Rappaport paper, “Groundwork,” the problem I wanted to think with was how to grasp a ‘becoming-environmental’ of power in desertifying Inner Mongolia. I was especially interested in how the entanglement of two roots could become taken up as a template for a political understanding of the relationship between human behaviors – which could be adjusted by the configuration of an economic environment – and ecological and geophysical conditions, which could be at least partly controlled by calibrating human behaviors with the demands of a desired ecology. In the meantime, as I wrote it, I realized that anti-desertification politics with a stage for a rethinking of many ideas that you pointed out in your comments: agency, economy, environment.

Shafqat: In your work you argue that the Chinese state achieves an ecological outcome (stop desertification) by manipulating the response of its subjects to economic conditions, created in the economic sphere, thus bypassing the need to target its citizens’ subjectivities. How is this model of neoliberal conservation approach different from other such approaches which use economic incentives to alter behavior? I guess what I am asking is what is specific about the Chinese case here? Also, an implication of such an analysis is that there is no room for individual agency or consciousness. If so, where does your work stand in relation to conventional political ecology, which proclaims to be mission oriented?

Jerry: You’re certainly right to note that there isn’t anything exceptionally novel about thinking about the market as a corrective to environmental degradation. In the chapter what I was more interested in doing was to think about how the creation – through economic subsidies, manipulation of demand, etc. – of an economic environment to ‘catch’ ex-herders after grazing bans raised a certain question of how what the market is and what it does, not as a force of its own, but as part of a theory of human action and its amenability to conditions in an economic ‘environment.’ I’m interested here in coming into a conversation about what ‘marketization’ in China has meant, that has argued that market economics have been deployed as a way in which the state bolsters its own sovereignty, instead of a kind of post-Cold War hope that markets will somehow topple ‘socialism’ and drive political change.

What I really wanted to say is that in these programs the economic sphere becomes one ‘environment’ through which an ecological environment can be managed. They are entangled in such a way that politics aims to transform one to transform the other. And at the center of this is a new conception of the human subject as ‘environmental,’ in two ways. First, insofar as they act in an economic ‘environment,’ their behaviors can be conditioned as the desired response to stimuli. ‘Economic motivation’ becomes an interface between political plans and ecological change. So this is a second sense in which we can think of an ‘environmental subjectivity’ in its intimate relationship with power – manipulating behavior which has physical effects rather than teaching people to, say, care for the environment, becomes a way in which their status as being in a physical environment becomes operationalized politically. And if these programs are neoliberal, it won’t be in the sense of a pull-back of the state against the powers of a market that yearns to be free, but instead, following Aihwa Ong, neoliberalism will be a mobile strategy and logic of intervention, wherein a certain kind of subject is presumed in power.

So while agency or consciousness in a classical sense of an intimate governing of how people feel or experience themselves as subjects takes a different form, but it doesn’t go away. In ‘environmental’ programs, so posed, the agency of individuals that’s at the very center. I argue that ‘agency’ is anticipated and manipulated as the desired response to changing environmental conditions – it’s already presumed, but in the form of a controlled reaction to a well-calibrated economic environment. Agency therefore isn’t somehow outside of these programs. Rather it’s the very condition in which they can operate.
Shafqat: The ethnographic details of your paper focus primarily on one source: Mr. Li. Can you please talk about sources, and how are people coping with this transition from commercial livestock raising to commercial medicinal plant farming?

Jerry: In the chapter I focus on one family, partly to focus questions of ex-herding life. I’m not making a claim about representativeness, and I don’t think that there is a generalizable experience, but I will say that the ‘choice’ to become a farmer of medicinal plants (and de facto forester) is not made simply. While forestry agencies and local government aim to create economic conditions that over-determine this choice to grow roots as the natural ‘response’ of ex-herders, there remains an ongoing capacity to respond otherwise, a response-ability, to borrow from Donna Haraway. What I will say is that ecological degradation is distributed unevenly across the landscape, and this makes a big difference in whether or not people think of government programs and grazing bans as a ‘way out’ (chulu), as the Li family explained it, or as something else. Some families continue to hold onto grazing, but see it ending in coming years under political, economic, and ecological pressure, after which they will re-evaluate, while others try to cash out early to get in at the ground floor of some of these economic programs.

What I don’t discuss in the paper is that these programs are one moment in a broader ecology of economic interventions that aim to get people off the land or to hold them there as environmental actors. So, there are ecological migration villages and other real estate investments and subsidies that the local government supports, there are attempts to encourage new markets in things like stone-collecting (there is a tradition in China of loving strange rocks) or desert tourism on desertified sands. But what these programs share is that they aim to manage human habitation and behavior in a moment of ecological and economic precarity on the land.
Shafqat: At what stage of graduate work are you at right now? I guess I am asking how close are you to finishing your dissertation and what are the future plans, especially in terms of a new project?

Jerry: I’m currently finishing my dissertation, and am on track to graduate from UC Berkeley in May of this year. My future plans remain up in the air. My future projects grow out of some of the concerns in my dissertation, and especially with this haunting image of the earth in the air that I can’t shake – this is a problem that has arrested me throughout the research and writing of my dissertation. So I’ve been very interested in particulate matter, which is key problem in Chinese air quality concerns and indicate that the atmosphere has become dense. That is, it has become a problematic suspension, just as dust storms are. I’m currently thinking about what Peter Sloterdijk calls air-conditioning, the containment and management of atmospheric compositions, in relationship to a number of projects, embodiments, and problems directed toward this too-earthy air in China’s cities. I wanted to explore how particulate matter drives a series of new ways of embodying, governing, and especially air-conditioning China’s contemporary as a state of particulate exposure.

Karl: The interests in your paper weave together the cultural construction, social power dynamics, and medical and environmental dimensions of lead exposure occurring in a couple of paradigmatic places (La Oroya, El Callao) in Peru’s mining industry and its transportation network. It’s clearly a highly important topic at the intersection of major anthropological issues. What kinds of influences ‑ from fieldwork or travel experiences to certain conversations or texts ‑ led to your interest in this topic and to pursue it as your dissertation? Feel free to refer to related earlier versions of your interests and research that may have helped lead to your topic here.

Stephanie: I’ve been interested by the cultural politics of contamination and exposure for quite awhile. I studied environmental science as an undergraduate, a major at UC Berkeley which is quite interdisciplinary. I took a range of courses from traditional chemistry and biology to courses in environmental justice and anthropology. As an undergraduate, I stuck to a biological track, but my course work in the social sciences sparked my interest in the cultural complexity of environmental problems, particularly as they intersected with poverty, race, and models of economic development. After college, I worked for an environmental NGO that focused on issues of environmental health and policy. I became fascinated by the process of generating social concern around a potentially toxic chemical, most of which are incredibly difficult to study scientifically, conceive of ethically, and represent politically. In graduate school, however, I turned my focus to lead contamination, a scientifically well-established toxic material that has long-since been banned from U.S. consumer goods that come in direct contact with people. Yet, the “lead-scare” of tainted toys from China in 2007 (which gender and women’s studies scholar Mel Y. Chen has written compellingly about), or the old, chipping lead paint in U.S. urban spaces, point to the toxic metal’s persistence in certain human-inhabited spaces while it is annexed from others. The apparent obviousness of lead’s toxicity actually made it more intriguing for me to study ethnographically. How does a material get established as too-toxic for humans in one region, but continues to pollute another? Lead exposure in Peru provides a particularly compelling case to think with because of the ever-growing economic importance given to mining and the mineral industry, run mostly by companies from the U.S. or Europe where lead exposure is more stringently regulated. In addition to understanding the global distribution of lead commodities and contamination, I tried to better understand the localized political processes happening in Peru that attempted to inscribe lead as toxic and to reduce exposure to it. Given its persistence in the sites I worked at, I wanted to know what social practices in Peru resist international standards of harm and what can this tell us about the ethics of transnational mineral extraction, consumption, and economic development.

Karl: The image analysis you undertake is very important to your paper. These powerful images show the people of La Oroya and El Callao, especially young people, in environmental and sociocultural spaces that you note can highlight their personal vulnerability, on the one hand, or a rather impersonal or less vulnerable view, on the other hand. I think the audience who is aware of your work already, and others who will be following it, may like to know what it was it like to undertake this image analysis and whether there were certain influences or inspirations for this work that might not immediately meet the eye. Personally I would find it intriguing to hear how this image analysis was integrated into your research methods. For example, did you go into the image analysis with a sharp idea of the general or specific sorts of depictions you were interested in, or was it a more multi-stage style of methodological engagement? (and, if the latter, how did it work?)

Stephanie: I didn’t go into my research with a methodological focus on images. What I wanted to understand was how lead became political (or not) through various forms of social mediation. Methodologically, I tracked the various ways that people related to and represented lead, which included a wide range of media, including scientific reports, informational brochures, policy documents, newspaper articles, blog entries, and so on. So alongside my ethnography, I built up an archive of lead documents too. The imagery of children grabbed my attention pretty early on, particularly how as subjects of vulnerability to lead their depictions diverged between my two field sites, the port of El Callao and the Andean metallurgical city of La Oroya. The images of children seemed to anchor the moral dimension of lead politics, but to different effects depending on the socio-historical context of each place. I began to pay closer attention to how these images linked up with other narratives I heard about lead contamination and its human impacts. The dense distillation of meaning present in these images then provided a helpful tool for bringing together various sources of information on lead’s impact on human social behavior in my writing.

Karl: Your paper is important and offers insights to many sub-fields of anthropology including but not limited to environment and anthropology. These other sub-fields include medical anthropology and development anthropology to name only a couple. Through the lens of your own view of environment and anthropology would you be able to comment briefly on how you see your paper fitting in. Perhaps you could comment too on how you see your study creating an intersection of environment and anthropology with these other anthropological sub-fields.

Stephanie: I situate my work at the intersection of environmental and medical anthropology, but it can be difficult to contain because it also speaks to issues of economy, development, and knowledge. At the AAAs in 2013, I actually organized a panel with my Rappaport co-awardee Jerry Zee on ethnographies of exposure. One of our goals of the panel was to use the theme of exposure as a potential bridge between the subfields of environmental and medical anthropology. Exposure orients one’s attention to the environment-body interface and especially to its permeability.

Karl: You create a very interesting and productive spatial design in your research that contributes a particular strength to the paper. It combines the very linked yet contrasting sites of La Oroya in the Andean highlands and the port city of El Callao in the Lima Metropolitan area in coastal Peru. While comparative case study design is not unusual, it requires the use of spatial knowledge and often spatial imagination, so it’d be interesting to learn more about your choice of these sites. I’d be interested too, for example, to know if you had considered other spatial designs to your research.

Stephanie: El Callao and especially La Oroya are considered as emblematic sites of lead contamination caused by mining in Peru, but there are others. For instance, located fairly close to La Oroya is the city of Cerro de Pasco, famous for its ever-expanding open-pit mine and comparably high levels of lead contamination and exposure. Originally, I hadn’t considered more than one field site but one of my interlocutors in Peru enthusiastically encouraged me to study the “route” or “corridor” of lead, from the mine to the port. I then thought about three field sites: one each for extraction, refinement, and shipment. Cerro de Pasco-La Oroya-El Callao presented an appealing circuit to undertake such a project because the sites connect spatially along Peru’s central highway and temporally through a shared history of mining development that spans the entire 20th and now 21st century. For me though, three sites became unmanageable ethnographically. While I’ve visited Cerro de Pasco, I decided to focus on El Callao and La Oroya, in part because of the contrast between the Andes and the Coast intrigued me and in part because the regions contained lesser explored sections of the metal commodity chain. This mode of ethnography nonetheless required me to spend a great deal of my time on buses and collective taxis. A lot of my spatial understanding came from moving across these spaces, watching the dramatic scenery change between the coast and the Andes and across urban and rural regions.

1. To start with, can you say a bit about your background, what brought you to anthropology, and how did you select your fieldsite?

Growing up in Veracruz, I witnessed changes in both the material and social landscape that I wanted to develop a more complex understanding of. So I moved to central Mexico in order to pursue a degree in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at the Universidad de las Americas-Puebla (UDLAP). There, I developed my interest in Mexican Agrarian History and Environmental Anthropology through a collaboration with faculty members who were conducting archival and ethnographic research at the time on the changes in land tenure and use in the Cholula Valley. This experience inspired me to pursue a doctoral degree in Anthropology. I decided to focus my project on Veracruz not only because the area was familiar to me but also because it has generated such rich historical scholarship that I wanted to engage from an anthropological perspective.

Cornell has been a great place to develop my project conceptually. I have benefited from the generous guidance of faculty in the Anthropology and History departments. I have also received support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Cornell’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, and Mexico’s Council for Science and Technology (CONACyT), all of which allowed me to return to Veracruz in September 2012 and carry out 12 months of ethnographic and archival research.

2. Can you say a bit about your dissertation project and how your Rappaport Panel paper fits with it?

My project examines the less perceptible effects of modern state interventions in the northern highlands of Veracruz, Mexico. Specifically, I focus on the social and political afterlife of documents, artifacts, and industrial and monumental structures left by the implementation of post-revolutionary policies (such as the re-distribution of land to campesinos, the practice of indigenista policies, the implementation of major archaeological projects, and the nationalization of the oil industry) and the effects, desires, fears, and expectations that these material remnants generate. Crude Residues, the paper I presented at the Rappaport panel, is, in fact, a short version of one of my dissertation chapters, which focuses on the debris left by the oil industry in the city of Poza Rica. Both the paper and the chapter examine the ways in which, in this industrial setting, the natural and built environment has generated particular ways of seeing, perceiving, and inhabiting—of knowing—that are both generative and unsettling. Through an analysis of everyday encounters with the materialities of oil, I sought to demonstrate the ways in which crude residues alter living spaces and continue to informmodes of social and political organization in this region.

3. In your work, you engage with and draw upon new materialism, which is a relatively new terrain in anthropology. What do you see as the value of such an approach for anthropology, and how does it fit in with ethnography, which is, of course, conventionally a human-oriented endeavor?

Yes, in the paper I draw on the work of “new materialists” such as Jane Bennett as I was interested in finding a conceptual framework that could help me highlight the sensuous and material qualities of industrial debris and their implications in everyday social life. Once I paid serious attention to the unpredictability of igneous rocks, for instance, I was able to suggest that the transformation of the Papantla district into an oil region in the twentieth century was neither merely an act of political will, nor solely the product of scientific intervention and economic interest. It was rather the result of a working relation—of encounters—between a diverse array of human actors (scientists, Totonacs, foreign investors) and unstable and ‘vibrant’ material forms. The rest of the paper, similarly, followed a series of interactions (between oil residues and corporate actors, residents, retired oil workers and local scientists) that equally revealed the effectiveness or ‘agency’ of particular industrial objects, decaying structures, substances and smells. Overall, New Materialists’ conception of materiality—as always something more than mere matter: an excess, a force, or a vitality that renders matter active, productive and unpredictable, helped me think through my ethnographic and archival material. Yet, to account for the ability of ordinary material things to animate or produce dramatic and subtle effects does not mean—as Timothy Mitchell suggests in Rule of Experts—introducing in our analysis a limitless number of non-human actors and networks, all of which are somehow of equal significance and power.Rather, it means acknowledging the kinds of hybrid agencies, connections, and interactions, out of which intention and expertise in a specific context must emerge.

4. The ethnographic details of your paper are quite often harsh and represent people in difficult circumstances. Can you talk about the emotional/affective labor aspects of your fieldwork and writing process given your fieldsite and topic?

The project itself came out of my frustration with the nationalist and patrimonial rhetoric around oil in Mexico. I felt there was a need to de-naturalize oil and to turn to what people in the oil regions are left with. Insofar as I wanted to bring attention to the environmental degradation in industrial zones like Poza Rica, I was very aware that fieldwork was not going to be easy. It was in fact quite challenging as I tried to be particularly attentive to the difficult circumstances that oil in this region has generated. But while I wanted to highlight what I saw as residual forms of violence—the unacknowledged revolutionary legacies—I did not want to deny the optimism, hope, and commitment of many residents who either develop strategies to disentangle themselves from the noxious substances or have a strong affective connection with oil fields. Achieving a balance and trying to remain truthful to the diverse array of experiences I found in the field was the main challenge in this project.

5. Your work is part of the growing branch of anthropology focusing on natural resources and on oil. What do you see as the project of anthropology of natural resources today?

While the insights of anthropologists’ work on oil and resources more generally are not sufficient in themselves to guide national (or international) policies, it is nonetheless true that we can join, contribute or initiate a serious conversation around such policies—policies that will affect the ways in which both resources and people are understood and managed. In Mexico, for example, president Enrique Peña Nieto recently announced his constitutional amendments to open up Pemex (the Mexican state–owned Petroleum Company created after the nationalization of the industry in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution) to the private industry. Despite the importance of the reform, the debate around it was shockingly poor: full of mystifications around “the market”, “science”, and the “nation-state”.

On the one hand, supporters of the reform argued that Mexico’s old oil fields are depleting rapidly, and Pemex lacks both the money and technology to tap its substantial oil and natural gas reserves in the deepwater of the Gulf of Mexico and in the shale formations that run along much of the east coast. On the other hand, Peña Nieto’s opponents on the right blasted the plan as inadequate to attract investment. It would be easier, they argued, if Mexico could allow the type of concessions in which the United States and other countries transfer outright ownership of reserves to private companies. Meanwhile, Peña’s opponents on the left vowed to block what they termed as the “theft” of the nation’s resources. They proceeded with a discussion around “the true” meanings of the words and actions of the mythical figure of Cárdenas, responsible for expropriating oil in the 30s. Absent from the debate was the consideration of the behavior of shale formations and effects that the exploitation of unconventional oil (fracking) will generate: effects that will certainly transform—even more—not only the landscape of the oil regions, like the northern highlands of Veracruz, but also the lives of those living in them.

6. What is next for you? What are your plans for next year, and beyond?

I wrote the paper for the Rappaport Panel from the field. Now that both fieldwork and coursework are over I can devote myself exclusively to writing the dissertation. In fact, I just came back from attending Cornell’s Summer Institute on Contested Global Landscapes, which marks for me the start of this process.